That was how 22-year-old Toronto superstar-in-waiting Abel Tesfaye — the voice and the gradually less guarded face behind the Weeknd, inarguably the hottest thing happening to contemporary R&B at the moment — characterized his recent decision to succumb to the lure of a major-label record deal in an online letter posted to fans early last month.

As predicaments go, however, the Weeknd’s can’t be all that bad. He’s inked a multi-million-dollar contract with Universal Republic to essentially re-release three albums’ worth of material that has already been given away at length for free and to widespread acclaim online.

The announcement of said “predicament” came while he was already steering himself homeward at the end of a year-long concert tour that’s had him thrilling festival crowds and selling out concert halls on two sides of the Atlantic without ever granting a single interview to the press or asking fans to pay a cent for his music.

His sold-out homecoming at Sound Academy on Friday night was the first of four consecutive dates at the venue, a triumphant Toronto stand for which tickets have been long gone save a handful apparently still available for the final, added-at-the-last-minute performance on Nov. 5.

The Toronto dates aren’t a hometown aberration, either. Tesfaye reportedly defied doctor’s orders to rest his supple choirboy pipes to fulfill three other sold-out dates in New York City before coming home to a riotous Sound Academy on Friday.

Reviews of those gigs have been as bonkers as the effusive international press already accorded the three Weeknd “mixtapes” — “House of Balloons”, “Thursday” and “Echoes of Silence” — issued via the-weeknd.com between March and December of last year. Friday’s inaugural, tour-ending Toronto show was also … well … bonkers. It really was.

Conventional wisdom would peg the reclusive Tesfaye as a shrinking-violet studio rat utterly lost in front of a crowd, but the kid looked anything but fazed by the packed floor staring up at him and his band on Friday.

He hit every note you wanted a cat who had the balls to open Echoes of Silence with a Michael Jackson cover to hit, all night long, without the audible aid of voice-augmenting technology. Moreover, that room was chockablock with done-up young ladies hanging on his every, gossamer word, delightedly chirping every single self-loathing, psychosexually tormented verse that came out of his mouth back at him in a bizarre marathon of co-ed, closed-loop masochism.

Pulling the “hits” out from such a uniformly well-received set list was, thus, well nigh impossible. The Weeknd did manage, however, to cultivate a long-fused species of portentous intensity from a bunch of tunes that stuck to a creeping vibe equally indebted to slow-jam R&B, stoned ’70s prog-rock and pre-millennial Bristol “trip-hop” for 70-odd minutes. The Portishead tunes piped through the pre-show PA were no accident, I’m sure.

“The Morning,” “The Party & the After-Party” and “Rolling Stone” roused the floor to a contained boil, but “High for This” finally tilted things towards the extreme by unleashing a taste of tuff-gnarl sub-bass aggression before the exquisite “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” brought Sound Academy to its knees in a torrent of strobelit low-end sinewaves. “House of Balloons” is a music-studies thesis waiting to happen in its brilliant conflation of futuristic R&B ululations, Siouxsie and the Banshees sampledelia and thrumming dubstep bass.

The night’s climactic readings of “The Birds, Parts 1 and 2” and “The Zone,” one of the most misanthropic bedroom come-ons ever put to tape, also left deep bruises, although I confess I was enjoying myself too much while they were playing to take notes that would now orient them at specific points in the set.

The temptation is to react against the hype that’s followed the Weeknd around for a good 18 months now, but I can’t do it. The free “mixtapes” actually got better as time went on — “Echoes of Silence” was “House of Balloons” grimly perfected — and the live show is more than up to snuff. Heaven knows if there’s anyone left out there to buy the Universal Trilogy reissue when it hits the stands on Nov. 13, but my guess is that the Weeknd won’t suffer from finally being heard at a higher bit rate.

Or on vinyl. Mmmm.

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